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6 weeks of Claude Code

blog.puzzmo.com

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#191

Post by epolanski »

MarkMarine wrote: post #60
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…

Claude code is great until it isn’t. You’re going to get to a point where you need to modify something or add something… a small feature that would have been easy if you wrote everything, and now it’s impossible because the architecture is just a mishmash of vibe coded stuff you don’t understand.

You're misusing the tool starting from not giving clear instructions.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#193

Post by silenced_trope »

Fraterkes wrote: post #5

Irrespective of how good Claude code actually is (I haven’t used it, but I think this article makes a really cogent case), here’s something that bothers me: I’m very junior, I have a big slow ugly codebase of gdscript (basically python) that I’m going to convert to C# to both clean it up and speed it up. This is for a personal project, I haven’t written a ton of C# or done this amount of refactoring before, so this c…

Is GDScript really less efficient than C# in Godot?

What bottlenecks are you experiencing?

I'm a developer experienced with Python (GDScript-like) and C#, but am new to Godot and started with GDScript.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#194

Post by Xenoamorphous »

msikora wrote: post #159
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…

Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan! Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on anoth…

> Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan!

I wonder, are most devs with a job paying for it themselves, rather than the company they work for?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#195

Post by tecleandor »

Freedom2 wrote: post #179
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what dishonesty means. That's just someone who disagrees with you

Thank you for calling out my inaccuracy. One thing I'm always appreciative for in HN is the level of pedantry day after day.

That's not pedantry, pedantry would be if it were a very minor or technical detail, but being dishonest doesn't have anything to do with having a different opinion.

But this comment might step a bit into pedantry.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#196

Post by socalgal2 »

I wish I got this level of productivity. I think every article should list exactly what they asked the LLM to do because I'm not getting as much use from it and I don't know if it's because what I work on is rare compared to say website front and backend code and/or if I just suck at prompts/context or I'm using the wrong services or don't have the correct MCPs etc....

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#197

Post by zmj »

GiorgioG wrote: post #73
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not setting good enough boundaries or reviewing what it's doing closely enough. Police it, and give it explicit instructions. Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the proj…

Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.

Your claude.md (or equivalent) is the best way to teach them. At the end of any non-trivial coding session, I'll ask for it to propose edits/additions to that file based on both the functional changes and the process we followed to get there.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#198

Post by elliotec »

socalgal2 wrote: post #196

I wish I got this level of productivity. I think every article should list exactly what they asked the LLM to do because I'm not getting as much use from it and I don't know if it's because what I work on is rare compared to say website front and backend code and/or if I just suck at prompts/context or I'm using the wrong services or don't have the correct MCPs etc....

Is it possible to view the prompt history? I’ve had extreme levels of productivity and would love to list out how I’ve been using it generally for an article like this but it would be incredibly impractical to log it on the side.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#199

Post by jononor »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #174
risyachka wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"mental strain" in a way of remembering/thinking hard is like muscle strain. You need it to be in shape otherwise it starts atrophying.

My friend, there’s no solid evidence that this is the case. So far, there are a bunch of studies, mostly preprints, that make vague implications, but none that can show clear causal links between a lack of mental strain and atrophying brain function from LLMs.

We know that learning and building mental capabilities require effort over time. We know that when people have not been applying/practicing programming for years, their skills have atrophied. I think a good default expectation is that unused skills will go away over time. Of course the questions are, is the engagement we have with LLMs enough to sustain the majority of the skills? Or is there new skills one builds that can compensate foe those lost (even when the LLM is no longer used)? How quickly do the changes happen? Are there wider effects, positive and/or negative?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#200

Post by UncleEntity »

einpoklum wrote: post #147
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…

What exactly have you written with Claude Code? I have not tried it, for a variety of reasons, but my (quite limited, anecdotal, and gratis) experience with other such tools is, that I can get them to write something I could perhaps get as an answer on StackOverflow: Limited scope, limited length, address at most one significant issue; and perhaps that has to do with what they are trained on. But that once things get…

I've been working on the design of a fairly complicated system using the daffy robots to iterate over a bunch of different ideas. Trying things out (conceptually) to explore the pros and cons of each decision before even writing a single line of code. The code is really a formality at this point as each and every piece is laid out and documented.

Contrast this with the peg parser VM it basically one-shotted but needed a bunch of debug work. A fuzzy spec (basically just the lpeg paper) and a few iterations and it produced a fully tested VM. After that the AST -> Opcode compiler was super easy as it just had to do some simple (fully defined by this point) transforms and Bob's your uncle. Not the best code ever but a working and tested system.

Then my predilection for yak shaving took over as the AST needed to be rewritten to make integration as a python C extension module viable (and generated). And why have separate AST and opcode optimization passes when they can be integrated? Oh, and why even have opcodes in the first place when you can rewrite the VM to use Continuation Passing Style and make the entire machine AST-> CPS Transform -> Optimizer -> Execute with a minimum of fuss?

So, yeah, I think it's fair to say the daffy robots are a little more than a StackOverflow chatbot. Plus, what I'm really working on is a lot more complicated than this, needing to redo the AST was just the gateway drug.

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